Still, our excitement comes from that nebulous mental zone wherein our lack of awareness governs our blissful anticipation. Therefore, we await Dark Sun not as fans parched by the desert of experience but as curious explorers interested in the oasis of content offered by the setting.

My hackneyed metaphors aside, I know for sure that the next campaign I’m running — whether it is for a group of women I’m currently adventuring with in a homebrew setting of Girlfriend DM’s or for the group in the modified Eberron game I run — is going to be in Dark Sun.

I’ve been trying to become familiar with Dark Sun by trying to unearth beginner friendly resources available on the Internet and will share them with you, in case you too are a Dark Sun newb like I.

If you’re approaching this completely from the perspective of a 4E player/DM trying to get pumped up in anticipation of the release of the campaign materials on the 17th of August, then you should visit Dungeon’s Master, where Ameron, a self-confessed Dark Sun newb, currently has a broad slew of posts about the setting. He’s shared the world primer (a la Ten Things About Eberron), an excerpt for new rules such as weapon breakage, and the pregenerated characters that are going to be used in the new season of D&D Encounters.

For those of you who are interested in diving headfirst and sooner rather than later, then perhaps you should visit Athas.Org, one of the premiere Dark Sun sites which focuses on providing 3rd edition support for the setting. That doesn’t mean it’s useless to 4E fans like us. What the site does is provide a legal means of exploring the lore of Dark Sun without having to troll the bargain bins and retail sites for second hand copies of Dark Sun material.

Lastly, Alphastream1 at the Wizards of the Coast community is doing a series of blog posts about various aspects of the Dark Sun setting including the unique flora and fauna which populate its harsh and unforgiving surface and the ways in which the standard races differ from their Points of Light/Eberron/Forgotten Realms counterparts.

Well, that’s about it. I’m sure there’s more out there, but I hope these resources prove useful to you.

I was really sad about not being able to find D&D Encounters here in Metro Manila – I’ve been absorbing all the 4E Dark Sun info that I can, and I also happen to have a good amount of knowledge (recently read the Prism Pentad series) on the 2E version of the setting.

With that in mind, since we couldn’t wait for August (and because our Eberron game ended a bit earlier than expected), we’ve already begun our 4E DS game, based on the spoilers that have been posted everywhere on the Internet. They’re just at level 3 now, but I’ll jump their characters to level 9 once the books come out (that way, we get to taste paragon for once).

We also just concluded our “intro to Dark Sun” game, which was based off the first book of the Prism Pentad series. Even with incomplete rules, we’ve been having a blast! Check out my blog if you want to read about it.🙂